I often visited our Friend Thomas Wilkinson at Yanwath on my way home from the market in Penrith. I remembered how Thomas had shown us a map of North America in his atlas, at the time when Rachel first set out on her travels, and in the latter days of Fifth Month I called on him, and asked if I might see the map again.4 This time, when I looked at the map of North America, I was appalled by its immensity, and by the great blank spaces of unexplored land beyond the known frontier. My heart quailed, but I showed it not. I conned the map as well as I could, that I might remember the details of my projected journey. Thomas and I found Quebec, and the great St Lawrence River, and the five lakes which Rachel had spoken of, which looked to be each as large as the Irish Sea, but all fresh water, and surrounded by a howling wilderness, which the atlas represented only as an impenetrable blank.
My uncle sent me word at last that he had got a passage to Quebec for me on the brig Jane, that because he was a shareholder the captain had agreed to give me a cabin berth for only seven guineas, and that I was to be in Whitehaven by the fourth day of Seventh Month. I made my final preparations. My mother pressed a little linen bag upon me, to go in my luggage, containing such necessaries as buttons, needle and thread, and a little green glass phial containing laudanum. I protested, for I could not sew, and I'd never been ill in my life. All I got for that was a lesson in stitchery on the spot, but later I had much cause to be grateful for her forethought.
The Jane only took half a dozen passengers; she was going out with manufactured trade goods, and reckoned to come back with timber. I think I had some notion in my head that a sea voyage would be a Romantic business; I'd imagined myself alone, confronted by the wild elements. If I was feart at all, it was less of storms and tempests and great seas, but that the French might shoot us to pieces. Indeed Joseph Peat reminded me at Meeting that it was Friendly practice to leave one's affairs in good order and make a will, but I heeded him not, for I had but my share in the farm, and that would go back to my father if I never came home.
1 My father taught me to swim. It's an art as seldom cultivated by Cumberland statesmen as by voyageurs, on the whole, but lads from Mungrisdale are used to go up to a pool under Bannerdale in summer, and egg each other on to feats of daring, jumping in off the rocks.
2Thomas and I together built the cottage for him when he married – six months it took us, from first stone to last slate – just where our track joins the Caldbeck road, twenty year ago that would have been, and now he has six bairns living, and three of them full grown forbye. But when I went away he was just a lad, and I was worried about leaving them all, but my cousins and a few of the Friends said they would watch over my family for me when I was gone, and that set my mind at ease a little.
3 Although I come of a longstanding Cumberland family on my father's side, and my mother's father was of the same good Quaker stock, my maternal grandmother was said to be half gypsy, though this was seldom spoken of. The fact is that Rachel and I have our mother's eyes, though in other respects, my mother used to tell me, I am all Greenhow, but not so my sister.
4 Thomas Wilkinson was an old man, in my eyes, when I first knew him, and it was from my father that I inherited the friendship. And yet Thomas and I had much in common, or rather, there was much that I learned from him, and he was ever kind to me. Unlike certain other Friends, Thomas never suggested that the climbing of mountains for its own sake should be regarded as a Vain Sport. On the contrary, he shared my love of the hills, and although he was much my elder, and in worldly rank greatly my superior, yet he was a practical farmer too, and always I enjoyed our discourse. It was Thomas Wilkinson who first encouraged me to read, and to take issue with the arguments put forth in books. I was never at school – there was talk at one time of sending me to the Friends’ School in Kendal, but when it came to it I could not be spared from the farm – but Thomas Wilkinson did his best to make up for the lack in my formal education. Perhaps he was a strange choice of model for an active lad in his teens, being always retiring, gentle and patient, but I admired his erudition, and, raw lad that I was, I did my best to emulate it. Thomas Wilkinson was distressed by the news of Rachel's loss; he had heard of her journeyings with interest – I shared her letters with him whenever I visited Yanwath – for he too had travelled in the ministry when he was younger, into the wilds of Scotland, where he had climbed one of their mountains named The Cobbler, and broken the record time of ascent by half an hour, which showed the Scotch what we men of Cumberland are made of. But that by the by.
CHAPTER 3
THE TRUTH WAS THAT THE SAILORS SAID WE HAD A smooth voyage all the way. In my opinion all smoothness was left behind the wall of Whitehaven harbour. They don't tell thee that at sea nothing stays still: the deck buckets to and fro, often at a ridiculous angle, so a man cannot walk straight, but must needs cling to ropes and bulwarks (which are plentiful and bruisingly hard), and stagger from place to place as best he may. They don't say how the waves gather and swell much higher than thy head, so that thee thinks, every time one comes, that the ship will surely founder, until the grey wall of water disappears beneath the hull, then drops you so thy stomach lurches, nearly tipping the ship right over into the ghastly trough below. I wasn't sick, but I was dogged all the time by an unpleasant queasiness. I could eat the dry biscuits, but the meat was beyond me. I was scunnered by the weevils and cockroaches, which would have troubled me less if my stomach had been composed. At night it was better. As I lay prone in my berth, my eyes closed against the dark, it was more like being rocked in a cradle, and indeed in our little ship on that great ocean I felt as helpless as an infant in its mother's arms. In sleep I succumbed, and yet it was a disquieting sensation of weakness for a young man in his prime.
During the days I found myself a sheltered place upon the aft deck, and wrapped myself in my blanket and wedged myself in there. It was better than the rancid air below, and I need only move when the rain grew to a cloudburst, or if it was dinnertime, or I had to relieve myself. I don't think I prayed. I couldn't read because my head ached; besides, although it didn't always rain it was still grey and damp, and often a great wedge of salt spray crashed over the decks. I cannot bear to see a book mistreated.
At Highside my father had the journal of John Woolman.1Woolman's journey across the Atlantic was much worse than mine. In accordance with our testimony of simplicity he insisted upon travelling steerage. I'd wondered if I should do the same, but I couldn't offend my uncle, who'd arranged my berth for me, and to be honest, when I saw how cramped and foisty the ship was, I was glad of the little private space I had. I shared my cabin with a timber merchant who had made this crossing several times. He regaled me with enough stories of disasters at sea to send me home for good, if I'd been in any shape to listen to him. However, he gave me pastilles for my headache, and remarked again – I do not know how many times I'd heard it by the time we disembarked – that those who would go to sea for pleasure would go to hell for pastime.
John Woolman, good man that he was, yearned over the plight of the seamen, and laboured tenderly among them that they might recognise the light which is within all men, however low in this world their lot is cast. I yearned over no man, but sat staring up at the white-tipped waves and, each time we rose to the crest, at the far grey space which was neither sky nor sea. There was no horizon, merely a nothingness which surrounded us on every side, so we appeared never to move, for all that the great sails were full and taut above my head, but simply to be suspended in a little world of our own. My senses warred with my reason, and whispered to me that this sea world could never move or change. My notebook is a blank, but for the count of days, which I recorded faithfully, with a double line by First Days to show the weeks. There had not been a day in my life heretofore which deserved no mark but a blank. Life is sweet, and at three-and-twenty, sickened by the endless sea, I first grasped that it is also short, and therefore precious. The present waste induced in me a melacholy I couldn't shake off. So this is eternity, I
thought, as my head throbbed, and a rope beat endlessly upon the mast above me – slap slap, slap slap – like a weary heartbeat. And if it were, I thought sullenly, then eternity was a kind of hell. The sailors bent over their work were goblin creatures, the words they tossed to and fro between them over the noisy sea more profane than ever I'd heard in speech of men before, even in Whitehaven.
Yet Woolman spoke the truth: there is that of God even in these seamen, outcasts from the earth, who know not God and malign his name with every phrase they utter. For after a day or so men did stop and speak to me. They offered me rum and tobacco, which they said would stop my sickness. When I refused one lad cried on me, ‘To hell wi’ thee, tha god-damned son of a poxy whore, thou'rt but a canting Methody. Thee'll be buggered for that.’ I knew the accent at once, and said, was he from Cockermouth or thereabout? It turned out his brother had worked for a cousin of mine, a Friend over at Whelpoe, and after that Joshua – for that was his name – forbore to swear when I was by, and I forbore to mention the principles of our Society, for I could tell he did not wish to hear.2
We saw no other vessel for three weeks, but then one foggy morning I woke to a new manner of pitching, and, hoping that we might be in sight of land, I was up and dressed in no time, and struggling up the companion. A thin line of land lay to the west of us, and close to I saw upwards of half a dozen open fishing boats tossing like so many corks on the sea around us. God help the men who earn their bread that way. Joshua, the lad from Cockermouth, was leaning over the gunwale with a couple of other seamen. I staggered over to them, and clutched the rail. They were fishing with a long line – no rod, no bait – just a long line tagged with bright strips of tin, and bare hooks on the end of it. Josh offered me a spell, and caught six fine cod within a minute. I can claim no skill for that.3 I never caught so much, pound for pound, in a day on a Lakeland river as I did in a few seconds off the coast of Newfoundland, but any man could do the same, who had a string and a hook by him, for there are as many fish in those waters as there are pease in a pea soup.
Land.
Had I not crossed the ocean, I would never have thought about land in the way that I do. And yet the first sight of the new continent was grim enough: a cold fog-bound coast with lowering cliffs where the gulls cried like damned souls. Josh told me that seamen fear to be buried at sea because the soul can never find rest. As the body is tossed to and fro and eaten by the fishes, so the soul must wander through the dreary wastes of the world for ever. I told him that was not so, that there is a light within every man that burns as well on sea as land, and neither death nor salt water can extinguish it. He told me that the coast we saw was called Newfoundland, and that none but savages were hardy enough to dwell there, which wasn't hard to believe.
For two days or more we followed an inhospitable coast, broken only by the outpourings of numerous rivers, and always hung over with grey drizzle. We were sailing close-hauled, plunging through grey waters at a forty-five degree angle, which made the simplest tasks a major gymnastic feat. Everything was wet. If this were North America, I thought, I wanted none of it.
I shivered in my damp blanket, and then, suddenly, like a burst of sunshine, I felt rage. I was hugely, furiously angry with Rachel. I forgot I was cold. I forgot to feel sick. I was deluged with memories. I remembered the cradle by the hearth in our kitchen, and the small demon in it who screamed without stopping, while my mother and even my father rocked it and shushed it and sang to it. Now the gulls wheeled over my head and screamed the same screams, mocking me. I would have stopped her screaming; I would have killed her. When I told my parents that – for I was but three years old, and knew no better – they made us worship together in silence, standing around her cradle. I didn't want to pray. I wanted to seize her by her white blanket and throw her on to the bare flags and shut her red mouth and beat her with my fists until she stopped screaming.
All her life she'd asked me for things. All her life I'd taken what she dealt out. All her life I'd had to accommodate her, to live with her, rescue her, listen to her . . . I cast off my blanket, and lurched across to the gunwale. I held on with numb hands, and stared resentfully at that savage coast to which she'd dragged me. I was sick and cold and – it came to me, as if my blood had suddenly unfrozen in my veins – furiously hungry. As I stared at the troubled water I realised that there were no more white-caps around us. The sea was no longer grey but almost green. I looked up, and the sky was as blue as I had last seen it above Blencathra.
Angry I might be, but I could never help admiring Rachel too. I'd never known a lass less hampered by her petticoats than she. In my young heedlessness I taught her to scale the easier end of Raven Crags, and even took her up Bannerdale. I tucked her frock into her drawers, and showed her how she must only move one hand or foot at a time, and keep her weight against the rock. She couldn't reach as far as I could, and sometimes I had to give her a leg-up, but she could move fast and sure, and was never for a moment feart. ‘Twas pity she was not a lad, for never did I feel in so much charity with her as when we were out on the hill. But because she was a maid our wildest adventures had to be kept secret, and as I grew older I realised it was wrong to lead her into such lads’ ploys, and so I kept my distance.
That afternoon I did fall justice to my dinner at the captain's table. I took the opportunity to ask him if I could see a map. ‘A chart,’ he said sternly, but he took me to his cabin to have a look.
The chart was a revelation. I pored over it so long that at last the captain left me to it, bidding me not to touch anything. I was too engrossed to be insulted. The wide ocean was of no interest to me: it has no shape. But now I could trace a meaning to our wanderings. I saw how the grim coast was the southern shore of the land of the Little Esquimaux, and how the barren island next to us was shaped like a cloud in the wind, and had a name of its own: Anticosti.4 The hour I spent studying the captain's chart of the Island of Newfoundland and the Gulf of St Lawrence was a turning point in my journey. For the first time the unknown land had a shape, and a name. I wondered if Rachel had seen such a map when she came here. It might not have interested her, but as for the actual coastline, the reality of the new country: I'm sure she stayed on deck in all weathers and gazed and gazed at it with that silent excitement with which she faced new things, and which I knew so well.
We were out of sight of land again, but now I knew where to look. I sighted Cape Gaspé at the very moment that the man aloft sang out the name. There was a great rock under which the sea had beaten out huge arches, where rainbows shimmered in the spray. After that I began to see little farms, the yellow cornfields ripe for harvest. I was blithe to see that the whole land was not given over to wilderness. People come from all over England to our corner of wilderness here in Cumberland, but they only think they love it because they need have none of it. I farm the land; I have no such romantic notions, and so it was that the little farms of Lower Canada made me feel at home, for all they were as unlike a Lakeland hill farm as chalk from cheese.
The St Lawrence River is so great that we did not see the north shore again until we were almost arrived at Quebec city, though when the weather cleared I saw hills like those at home to the north of us, almost indistinguishable from clouds. I was sick of the confines of the Jane, sick of the constant swell and the damp. Put me on land again and I would engage to cross a continent. The last day dragged by. We could see both banks of the river now. We came to a stretch of open water in which above twenty great ships were moored, and little boats plied to and fro between them. Beyond I saw a citadel set on a hill above a precipice. Ever since we'd entered the St Lawrence River there'd been much ado around me setting and re-setting the sails, and now all the men were piped aloft again, and slowly the great sails flapped and furled with tremendous thwacking noises over my head. I heeded them not; my eyes were strained upon the land ahead.
The fort sat on the hilltop like a paper crown; above it the Union Jack streamed in the wind. A city straggled up t
he spine of the hill. A belltower surmounted by a cross pierced the summer sky. The sun winked against red roofs and made me blink. I saw warehouses, and a street of white houses, three or four storeys high, fronting the harbour. Slowly the gap between ship and shore diminished. All the sails were down; we were barely moving. People were moving on the shore. There was a beach, and a low wharf. A great rattling came from the bowels of the ship. It was the first time I'd heard the anchor lowered. The awful voyage was over.
Voyageurs Page 4